“Yup.” She stuck her bottom lip out and huffed, blowing her hair out of her eyes. Wes looked at her cereal bowl, where what was left of her Crunch Nuggets was growing bloated and sodden in the milk, and he wondered if she planned to at least clean up after herself.
“Oh, Jesus H.,” she said. She snatched the bowl out from in front of him and dumped its contents in the sink, then ran the garbage disposal without turning on the water first. “Better?” She disappeared into the bedroom, returned a few minutes later in a sweatshirt and jeans, and paused in the door between the kitchen and the living room, hands on her hips. “OK. I’m going.”
Wes tried to process this. “For good?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Because you say I didn’t listen to you about Virtuz?”
“I don’t just say,” she said, “but no, that’s not the reason. Or all of it. I just realized that we’ve hit the wall.”
“The wall,” Wes repeated. This was how Sonya spoke: not a wall, but the wall, as if Wes ought to know what she was talking about, as if the thing they’d hit was looming ahead in the distance all along.
“The ‘more work than fun’ wall,” Sonya said. “The, ‘My boyfriend has a tablet instead of a heart’ wall. So anyway, I’ll see you at work.”
“That’s it?”
She stopped at the door. “What else would there be?”
“And you’re still going to work at my company?”
She cast a level gaze at him. “Well, unless you’re planning to fire me for not fucking you anymore.”
“God, when you put it like that,” Wes said.
“See you at work,” she said again firmly. And as quickly and unceremoniously as she had entered his life, she left it.
—
“You could say I had a crisis,” Wes was telling Marta on the touring bus as it rolled past still-familiar landscape. The Salt Line was at least a half-hour’s drive away according to a map animation on the overhead monitor, but the Wall’s vibration was already making its presence known, shivering the window glass, wiggling into the soles of his feet so that he had to start flexing his toes against numbness. “I needed a radical change in my life. I needed to do something no one expected me to.” By no one he meant Sonya, of course, but he’d be damned if he’d say her name aloud, even to a person who had never met her, who knew nothing about how they’d come together and why they split.
“And you think it was the right choice?” Marta asked. She was a good listener, easy to confide in.
“Well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” He drummed a little rhythm on the tops of his thighs. “Wow. Feels weird not having my tablet.”
She sighed. “For me, too.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I went without it,” Wes said. “It must have been that brownout three years ago.”
Marta shivered. “That was scary. The boys had just left for college. I couldn’t reach them. I had no idea how they were.” Her face sagged, as if she’d suddenly realized she was now in a version of the same position.
“Those ‘free yourself from the tablet’ nuts—you’ve got to wonder about them,” Wes said. Marta had insisted he take the window seat, and so he stole a quick glance outside, wondering, like a little boy, Are we there yet? Are we there yet? So far there wasn’t much to see. Thirty kilometers back, they’d passed a community of single-wide trailer homes: cars rusting into piles of weeds, laundry flapping on lines. No one outside, not even playing children. There had been no housing since. Ten or fifteen kilometers ago, he’d noticed that there weren’t trees or shrubs any longer, and the October grasses had yellowed, but there were some fields of wildflowers—goldenrod, purple asters—to break up what was otherwise a level and almost wintry prospect but not an overtly dismaying one. Past the Wall, however, the situation would change. We’re talking a little bit “scorched earth” for the first couple of miles, Andy had said. Nothing they hadn’t seen on the feeds, more or less, but experiencing the thing in the flesh would be different. “It always struck me as a kind of bullshit proposition,” Wes continued. “You know, willfully out of touch with how the world is. Like, if you’re not going to use a tablet, I hope you’re also going to grow your own veggies and never ride in a car or a train. Good luck with that.”
His right-hand thumb was miming the tablet sweep stroke, and he tucked the hand under his thigh.
“I’m obviously biased. If I sold ice cream for a living, maybe I’d try to convince you it doesn’t make you fat.”
“I don’t think that’s a fair comparison,” Marta said. “You’re being hard on yourself.”
“Well, maybe.” He looked down, embarrassed—as if Sonya were watching him and smirking—by the conscious pose of his modesty. Sonya had, in the months since their breakup, become a kind of scolding, mocking voice in his head, and the pathetic part was that the voice comforted him. He liked it. “Anyway. I say all that because I have to admit that part of the appeal of this trip for me was going somewhere the signals don’t reach. Three weeks of feed silence. Crazy, right?”
“I wouldn’t call it crazy,” Marta said.
“Like Captain Cluck swearing off fried chicken.” He smiled ruefully. “There was this . . . person. This person I’d come to depend on. And then she didn’t want me to depend on her anymore. At first, it didn’t bother me much. I told myself it didn’t. But I still had to work with her, and I’d see her in the office, and she’d act completely nonchalant. Not just like she was over me, but like there wasn’t anything for her to get over in the first place.”
Marta patted his microsuit-clad knee. “I’m sure that wasn’t the case.”
He lowered his voice, aware of a gradual silence that had settled in the seats around his and Marta’s. In the quiet, the vibration coming off the TerraVibra—whose presence had been so creeping and gradual—was obvious, verging on overwhelming, and Wes used his middle fingers to knead the two points just in front of the hinge of his jaw. “She wouldn’t talk to me, except work stuff. And then I checked my feeds even more than I usually do, thinking maybe she’d call or message. Or I’d see something to help me know what was going on with her.”
“Did you?”
Wes was almost whispering now. “One night she spent twenty credits at a restaurant I used to take her to, this steak house. Mahogany. But so did this other guy at work, Timothy. Same place, same night. Same time for the charge.”
“They could have just been friends,” said Marta.
“That’s what I thought,” Wes said. “I considered it rationally. They’re on the same design team. They each paid their own tickets. But a few nights later, they both rang up simultaneous charges at a bar. Then dinner again the next week. Then, the same night as the dinner, Pine Ridge Bed and Breakfast puts a two-hundred-credit hold on his account.”
Marta didn’t have a response to this. She gave him a pained, tight little smile, eyebrows drawn into a pitying peak.